Divine Personhood

What does it mean to do God's will?

A friend of mine is an iconographer and also enjoys riding horses. Her interests come together in the icon of St George, because he is often depicted as riding a horse.

While meditating on this icon, she came to the conclusion that the image of St George on a horse is a metaphor for working in tandem with God to do His will. When gracefully working together, the rider and the animal are more powerful than either entity could be on its own. By treating the horse with gentleness and love, the rider is able to harness its great power and to move beautifully together.

Yet, the nature of a horse is essentially different from human nature. While horses are intelligent, they lack the faculty of speech, so communication is difficult. The rider struggles to understand the horse, and to speak or respond to it. But somehow, two different things—a person and an animal—work together in harmony.

Similarly, God’s will can feel foreign and unknown to us, as different as an animal is from a human. And there’s also the direct communication issue, because God doesn’t usually just come out and say what His will is. We must struggle to decipher what He wants.

We approach God with gentleness and love, because we want to be receptive to learning His will, so we can work together to move with grace and beauty, like a rider on a horse. Working with God’s will allows us to be more powerful than we would otherwise be, compared to what we could accomplish if our only desire is to manifest our own personal will.

Humanity shares something of the animal nature, because we are animals that have been endowed by God with rational self-awareness. The Greek term for this rational self-awareness is nous, and it refers to our mind. The nous is what separates humans from animals. Animals can be intelligent, but they lack the ability to use speech to confirm their rational self-awareness. When an animal does something that appears to show intelligence, we may wonder if the animal understands what it is doing, or if we are merely projecting our intelligence onto the animal as a motive for its actions.

God’s will can be the same way. Is something truly God’s will, or is it merely our impression of God’s will? Something might be our own personal will, but we have convinced ourselves that we are doing God’s will.

The challenge of deciphering God’s will is similar to the relationship between a human and an animal, because we are dealing with unlike things. Human and divine nature are different, just as the nature of humans and animals are different. Yet, a relationship and understanding are possible, since there is some overlap. Humans share in animal nature, because we ourselves are animals. We are animals that are endowed with higher intellectual faculties, and we try to transcend our aggressive and animalistic instincts.

Likewise, divine and human nature are fundamentally different. Humans can participate in God’s work and experience His energy—like the apostles who witnessed the transfiguration of Jesus Christ on Mount Tabor—but we can never know God’s divine nature. However, the two natures are united in the person of Jesus Christ, who is both God and man. Christ is the Godman, or Theanthropos.

People can ride horses because we share the same animal nature, just as people can do God’s will because, through Jesus Christ, human nature is connected to divine nature.

This is where the Russian theological term Bogochelovechestvo applies. It is defined as divine humanity. Since Christ brought together human nature with the essence of divinity, they are now irretrievably and permanently connected. And we, ourselves, participate in human nature so, through the person of Christ, we are connected to the divine nature.

It is this connection to divinity that allows us to have any relationship with God’s will. We could redefine Bogochelovechestvo as divine personhood, and say that this personhood allows us to interact with God’s will. Divine personhood exists in each person, regardless of whether or not that person is a believer, because Christ has already brought the two natures together.

Non-believers can, therefore, be instruments of God’s will, either unwittingly or knowingly. Yet, we can be more effective and powerful by working together with God and intentionally being vessels for His will. It is like the relationship between horse and rider, except that God’s will is the rider, so we must allow ourselves to submit to the higher power.

But we circle back to the same question. How do we know if we are doing God’s will? It could merely be our perception of God’s will. So, ultimately, we could be doing our own will, under the pretext of doing God’s will.

To resolve this problem, let us focus on the connection that we have to God, because it is this connection that enables us to have any interaction or understanding with God. We must look at our divine personhood.

Divine personhood is part of our basic reality and everyday experience, whether or not we are aware of it. Why is the pronoun ‘I’ the only pronoun that is capitalized? It reflects the divinity within each person. When someone uses the pronoun ‘I’, he or she is expressing their rational self-awareness, or nous. We capitalize it for the same reason that we capitalize the pronoun ‘He’ when referring to God, because the pronoun ‘I’ shows the divinity inherent within each individual person.

Divine personhood is similar to the term Namaste from the Hindu tradition. It is a greeting that means the divinity in one person recognizes the divinity in another person.

Divine personhood is also related to the truth of each person, which was discussed in an earlier post about the Logos. Logos is the truth of a thing, or the reason that something is what it is. In the mind of God, there is a unique thought for each person. The thought is known as a logismoi, derived from the term logos, and each person has a corresponding logismoi in the mind of God.

In God’s mind, there is also a logismoi for each thing that exists; for every concept. For instance, the logos of a horse is its horsesiness, or that which distinguishes a horse from all other animals. But in regards to humanity, God doesn’t simply have a thought for the species of human beings as a whole. He has a unique thought for each individual person, because each person participates in divine personhood.

God has a unique thought for you and for me, and for everyone else. This thought, or logismoi, is the truth of ourselves. It is what makes us who we are. Although the thought itself is like a perfect version of ourselves. It is an image that we strive for but cannot fully achieve, because perfection can only exist in the world of ideas. In the physical world, we are always in a process of becoming, so perfection is not possible. In the same way, we can be nice and we can be honest—we can participate in these concepts—but we cannot be niceness or honesty itself.

We can understand what it means to be nice and to be honest, and we can try to act accordingly, if we value these things. Likewise, we try to understand our own unique and personal truth, and we manifest that truth into reality, even if incompletely. What brings us joy and happiness can be a good indication of how close we are to approximating our logismoi. But, in the end, the truth of each person is a private matter between that person and God. For this reason, we cannot judge others, because we do not fully comprehend the truth anyone else. We may scarcely understand our own truth, let alone the truth of someone else.

When we die, it is precisely this truth that we will discuss with Jesus Christ on the day of judgment. How close did we come to achieving our personal truth and manifesting it in the world? Will God recognize His craftsmanship in us? Or, we could be so distorted from sin that God does not recognize us and He sends us away.

The truth of ourselves and our divine personhood is the vector that connects us to God and His will. There’s really no such thing as God’s will in a general sense. We cannot know, for example, God’s will for the year 2025, or for the nation of America. The only thing that we can try to know, and to do, is God’s will for ourselves. We can try to realize and manifest our own personal truth. While belief in Christ is not necessary for someone to seek their own personal truth, Christ helps us to understand our truth more fully and completely.

In considering God’s will, it is only ever a question of what we can do at a given moment in time. Things happen that are out of our control, and these events may or may not be God’s will. But when talking about God’s will, the biggest question is our response to anything that happens. And our only connection to God, or His will, is through His Son, Jesus Christ. Our connection is through our divine personhood. We interact with God through the pronoun ‘I’, which is to say that someone interacts with God by what they say, do, and feel.

To do God’s will, therefore, means to manifests one’s own unique truth in the world. Other people can support and guide us, as we seek to understand our own truth, but ultimately it is a concern between each person and God.

God, too, supports and guides us in our effort to do His will. We seek divine guidance and hope for clues to determine what He wants. This interaction between humanity and divinity—between the Creator and the created—has been referred to as divine wisdom, or Holy Sophia. Sophia is our partner in the world to learn about and do God’s will, although only in the sense that God’s will is for each person to be faithful to his or her own truth.

Consequently, to do God’s will means to seek divine wisdom about ourselves, so we know how to respond to whatever happens in life. God’s will is for us to be true to ourselves.